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Tuesday, October 21, 2014

Re: [Yasmin_discussions] Why does art-science matter?

Thoughtful point, Joe. Quick, rambling response, here . . .

Regarding reaching general audiences, I guess, well, it takes a village -- i.e., Jackson Pollock needed the help he got from Harold Rosenberg and Clement Greenberg. And Pollock's in-your-face radicalism didn't hurt either. Art itself has only a fleeting hold on the meanings an artist intends -- those meanings don't get forged into broad cultural existence until taken up and expanded upon by others. And it doesn't happen overnight. In my experience curating a couple decades of art-science exhibitions, I've found it a major challenge to get critics and writers to take the genre (if it's that) seriously. Mostly, when they do write about it, they target its novelty -- the pairing of strange bedfellows, these two domains from stereotypically opposite ends of a spectrum. That's about as deep as it goes -- the reviews are happy, upbeat, sometimes informative, surface-scratching. I think -- embedded within the art-science enterprise is a pretty radical idea, still: the supernatural is unnecessary to the enterprise of a meaningful existence. But if you want art to spread meaning, you can't rely on art to do the spreading. It's a problem for art-science -- despite burgeoning participation among artists and academics, for the public it doesn't really exist -- or if it does, it doesn't yet challenge or offend them, doesn't have an edge. It's still too pretty . . .

Stephen's post from Sunday got me thinking about my frustration at what I perceive to be art's ineffectiveness at proselytizing when it comes to rejecting (or even questioning) the supernatural. On the contrary, I'm afraid that art often reinforces the bankrupt notion of Intelligent Design by the mere fact that it involves a creator—this is the false equivalency that ID advocates use as "proof" of a divine source for all natural phenomena. If I as an artist find beauty in a natural process or an elegant mathematical equation, and use this as the source of my artwork, I have played right into the hand of the religionist who argues that---like God---I have consciously guided these processes to create something meaningful. Stephen's most recent post linking pictorial/illusionist space in art to imaginary/supernatural space in science is intriguing as well; but I wonder how realistic it is to expect a general audience---presumably, one that is largely under the sway of supernatural beliefs---to pick up on such esoteric and subtle concepts. For these reasons, I am skeptical of art-science's ability to effectively make this case, at least on a large scale.

Yesterday on National Public Radio I heard talk of an atheist church movement called Sunday Assembly — a gathering to share fellowship in the spirit of humanitarian existence, to hep the disadvantaged, to welcome all types. It sounded a lot like conventional church, but refreshingly sans-supernatural. But what of the social reality that provides such an enterprise its uniqueness? What of the immense body of institutions on the other side of the equation, that embody and perpetuate the supernatural as the guiding force of the cosmos?

In a forum like Yasmin it makes sense to approach the subject under discussion from an academic and philosophical prospective, to speak of the supernatural in terms of the limits of science and the knowable. In those terms the postings have been welcomed, thoughtful and productive. But my struggle is that a debate over the limits of science, the theories and principles of indeterminacy, etc., will likely never reach the vast swaths of population whose existence is defined by a much more prosaic notion of the supernatural. For that majority, the supernatural is conceived as intervening surreptitiously and constantly, undetected by science and with an agenda, in all the minute affairs of the material and immaterial. The specifics of that intervention include virtually all causality throughout the universe and miraculous daily contradictions with known science, as well as the magical micro-management of the intellectual processes and emotional sensations of every living one of a particular primate species on planet Earth — and to that majority, this all makes perfect sense. This concept of the supernatural lacks only the belief in a geocentric solar system to distinguish it from virtually the same majority beliefs of a millennia ago. It is stunning.

Science is not very good at proselytizing — and can be forgiven, since that's not its bailiwick. In fact science is really very bad at it, and perhaps shudders some at its insiders who have broken through — the Sam Harris's and Richard Dawkin's. But proselytizing, in its laundered, metaphorical way, IS the bailiwick of art. And now art, in a rather remarkable spontaneous combustion over the last several years, has gone public in its partnership with science.

There was a time, not too long ago really, when art had a much cozier-than-now relationship with religion, and it was through art that the supernatural was provided a convincing appearance — a veracity in pictorial space that bled into real space and persuaded generation after generation that the cosmos was indeed administered by magic. Now art pairs with science, and so other than the novelty of these two seemingly disparate domains coming together, and the production of pretty lab pictures, I wonder what art-science can do that is original in order to, as it were, atone for its history of helping spread the meme of a universe saturated in the supernatural? What can art-science do to more proactively include in its inventory of critical meanings the awareness of a reality that is both sublime and non-supernatural, that will reach that massive audience in a way that science, by itself, cannot? In a hundred-fifty year lineage of moments when art has mattered paradigmatically, why or how will art-science matter?

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